Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

“[I]t is not generally considered politically correct for women to seek out masochistic pleasures, whereas the pleasures of being nurtured and cared for are [still] offered as the politically correct alternative” (81) by many contemporary feminisms. This “politically correct alternative” has largely been born out of the writings of male psychoanalytic theorists, namely Freud, which have claimed that masochism is essentially concomitant with the natural expression of female sexuality: “[t]hat most ‘natural’ female instinct, masochism” (Freud cited in Massé 41). As reaffirmed by contemporary Freudian theorist Robert Tobin, “[W]hile in man it is possible to trace a tendency to inflict pain, or the simulacrum of pain, on the women they love, it is still easier to trace in women a delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover, and an eagerness to accept subjection to his will” (35). Inevitably, and justly, feminist psychoanalysts and literary theorists have been incensed by such claims. Women’s experiences of dubious pleasure in masochistic affairs are thus isolated by feminist theorists as a specific result of heteropatriarchy’s influence on female sexuality.

Although I do not make the assumption of a standard feminist perspective on representations of sexuality and violence or underestimate the complexity of feminist debate on this issue—there are feminisms rather than a single feminist position and, of course, as many variations on these positions as there are women—the restriction of the length of one chapter limits me to this most common feminist response: that romance plots involving masochistic female characters are damaging to women and the feminist project because they encourage women to respond erotically to the conditions of their own oppression.

Certainly, in response to representations of what have commonly been considered masochistic characters in the work of contemporary female authors such as Moore, critics predominantly place their focus on the text’s appropriateness in terms of the aims of feminism and its potentially negative effect on the movement’s achievements and progress.¹ As Carla Kaplan writes, “[F]eminist criticism has often looked to women’s